"Debby" turned out to be a drip

For all of you that have been watching the news and saw that Tropical Storm Debby was smack dab in the middle of Florida, I'm fine. They had the weather forecasters saying that we were going to get high winds , torrential downpours, etc. Her bark was worse than her bite. We got the rain & winds yesterday but the wind wasn't such a big deal. I had said to a friend on Facebook AKA Faceplant (as someone here newsie calls it ) that I was going to help my mother look for the hurricane lamp should we lose power. But there's no need to thank goodness!

Debby? We're already at D? Well, maybe Prairie can help you with the letter the next storm will be named for.

Usually June and July storms turn out to be just that, rain and wind, if anything at all. It's not until August, and mainly the beginning of September we get the really bad ones, let alone the hour showers the first two J-months and the loss of electricity during the day that signal we're in full-blown summertime down here.

Debby? We're already at D? Well, maybe Prairie can help you with the letter the next storm will be named for.

Usually June and July storms turn out to be just that, rain and wind, if anything at all. It's not until August, and mainly the beginning of September we get the really bad ones, let alone the hour showers the first two J-months and the loss of electricity during the day that signal we're in full-blown summertime down here.

Take care Kath. *Hugs.

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I think these storms like to put a big scare tactic into us. Several years ago Earl was approaching our area & had the meteorologists in a tizzy. The most he did was give us a big dousing of rain & that was it. No power outage or anything. (not that that's bad.) Now Hurricane Gloria was a different story! I was still living in NY then and the power was out for over a week! So I was over a friend's house & she was doing my hair by candlelight & I had my eyes closed. (Thank God I did.) She put hair spray & mousse in my hair. Suddenly my scalp felt hot!My hair was on fire!!! I did a stop drop & roll to put my head out!My friend apologized profusely & I said it was OK & went home a bit later like nothing happened. But my parents sure noticed! I had burn marks on my nose & forehead. My dad had to take me to the burn unit at the local hospital. He was NOT a happy camper! (My friend's mother thought she was going to get sued because she wasn't there. Thankfully my parents didn't) And wouldn't you know it, the darn power came back on that night! YEESH!!
*HUGS back*

I think these storms like to put a big scare tactic into us. Several years ago Earl was approaching our area & had the meteorologists in a tizzy. The most he did was give us a big dousing of rain & that was it. No power outage or anything. (not that that's bad.) Now Hurricane Gloria was a different story! I was still living in NY then and the power was out for over a week! So I was over a friend's house & she was doing my hair by candlelight & I had my eyes closed. (Thank God I did.) She put hair spray & mousse in my hair. Suddenly my scalp felt hot!My hair was on fire!!! I did a stop drop & roll to put my head out!My friend apologized profusely & I said it was OK & went home a bit later like nothing happened. But my parents sure noticed! I had burn marks on my nose & forehead. My dad had to take me to the burn unit at the local hospital. He was NOT a happy camper! (My friend's mother thought she was going to get sued because she wasn't there. Thankfully my parents didn't) And wouldn't you know it, the darn power came back on that night! YEESH!!
*HUGS back*

The worst storms I've lived through have been:
Hurricane Hugo in 88, which has become a legend;
Hurricane Georges, in 98; and
Hurricane Irene, last year in 2011, where we lost electricity for a whole week, but thanks to the generator we'd bought the year prior, you really wouldn't have known it cause I was able to log on no problem at all.

Oh, well, if we're going to talk about the worst storms we've seen in our lifetime, let's see...

Last year, we had some of the worst weather I had ever seen: in February, we had a sudden freak thunderstorm that put a vast majority of the city in feet of water... it's not everyday you turn on the news and see footage of a dumpster floating down main street. On a Monday in April, we had another freak thunderstorm that was a lot worse: the clouds were as dark as coal, the winds howled like a hurricane, sheets of rain poured down, trees were knocked down all over town... THEN we learned that was just a preview of what was to come, as that wicked system that was working it's way all week long through the southern half of the U.S. was expected to hit us by the following Thursday, which it did, almost all normal programming on the local channels was pre-empted for live weather coverage: we had torential rains, high winds, hail in some spots, it was a mess. The power didn't go out for either of those two occasions, but then at this exact time last year, yet another sudden and extreme thunderstorm blew through, knocking down more trees, and this time, it DID knock the power out for almost the entire town for hours, it was the largest outage in our utility board's history, not only that, but that particular storm also caused a lot of damage to my aunt and uncle's house, and they just recently FINALLY got most of the damage fixed (insurance companies are wonderful to work with).

They were saying on the news when all of that extreme weather was happening that in the next twenty to thirty years, that kind of extreme weather will actually be NORMAL, and that the new extreme weather will be even worse. Scary.

If I had the power to send any rain at all , I'd send it to Colorado. I'm sorry your grass is brown,J, but from what I've heard there are a LOT of fires out in CO. Lola..are you in CO.? (I'm not trying to be nosy. You don't have to answer.)

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I've been through four hurricanes personally...ummm... Elena in 1985; Kate in 1985 (it tore up trees all over our neighborhood in Tallahassee and knocked out power for days); Opal in 1995 (adopted a stray cat that day to protect her from the storm); Jeanne in 2004 right after my dad's funeral (which had been postponed for a week due to Ivan!). (Had to go look up a couple of the names. I remember the damage but not the names...) I have no fear of hurricanes; you can see them coming. As long as you have adequate shelter and supplies you're fine.

I am totally envious of the rains in FL the past few days. Frog, I love a good palmetto-pounder! I miss those... Glad you're ok, Kathy!
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Like I said, long as you're prepared and have a good house, they're kind of fun. Impressive to watch. Not at all to denigrate the victims of Katrina (or Andrew, or Hugo, or those poor guys in central FL who had three storms hit them in about as many weeks and wiped them off the map)...you really do have to live a little above sea level, and have a strong roof, to get through them okay. But I'll take one any day over, say, an earthquake you can't see coming, or a tornado which hits a relatively small area with the concentrated force of its winds, or a wildfire which no amount of prep will save your home from. I've walked in the eye of a hurricane once...it was really, really eerie. The air FEELS different, and everything is crystal clear, and the sky looks strangely yellowish...marvelous.
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Like I said, long as you're prepared and have a good house, they're kind of fun. Impressive to watch
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Yeah, the closest I've come to seeing anything like a hurricane, again were those extreme thunderstorms we had last year, where the wind was so strong, and the rain was coming down so hard, it was horizontal and everything.

We've had an unusual amount of tornadoes around these parts in the last few years (none this year that I can recall); I've never experienced one directly before, but it's actually enigmatic for me: as fascinated as I am by severe weather, especially tornadoes, at the same time, one of my deep, hidden fears is being hit by a tornado, and it's actually a recurring nightmare I have ever few months or so... I think it's one of those things that's going to continue frightening me until it actually happens, then once it does, I won't have to be afraid anymore.

Not that I WANT to be hit by a tornado, but a hurricane I wouldn't mind experiencing just once.

New Jersey rarely has hurricanes or tornadoes on the magnitude of other parts of the country, but back around 1979 David blew through. The sky was GREEN, like I've never seen before or since, and it spawned a few tornadoes which took away our garden shed and what used to be our back porch. Luckily that was it.

But it's freaky how some parts of the country can be under six feet of water, while at the same time fires are raging out of control. If someone could find a way to take all the flood water and dump it on the brush fires, we'd all be happy.

New Jersey rarely has hurricanes or tornadoes on the magnitude of other parts of the country, but back around 1979 David blew through. The sky was GREEN, like I've never seen before or since, and it spawned a few tornadoes which took away our garden shed and what used to be our back porch. Luckily that was it.

But it's freaky how some parts of the country can be under six feet of water, while at the same time fires are raging out of control. If someone could find a way to take all the flood water and dump it on the brush fires, we'd all be happy.